The invention relates to the recognition and/or determination of the orientation of an object, for example a machine casting moving on a conveyor belt.
The use of robots on the assembly process of industrial machinery is greatly curtailed by their lack of vision. Even if vision is provided it usually only enables the robot to make a single simple decision. For example, it might be used just to confirm that a hole has been drilled into a part before assembly. In such known systems use is typically made of a single camera with the facility of comparing the information with a single stored image and it is required that the object be placed on a rotatable table and by rotating this table, establish when correlation between the image from the camera and the stored image is reached. The invention now to be described provides the robot or other interfaced device with far more powerful vision and thus greatly enhances its powers of recognition.